Hulu announced this morning the appointment of Kelly Campbell, the current head of Global Growth Marketing for Google Cloud, as its new chief marketing officer. The strategic hire for the streaming service will see Campbell tasked with driving Hulus overall marketing strategy across both its subscription video on-demand business and its new Live TV service, the company says.

Kelly is a respected, data-driven marketing expert who has consistently proven her ability to develop effective strategies and build strong, high-performing teams, said Hopkins, in a statement. With her deep background in performance marketing and in building strong connections between brands and their consumers, shes going to be an invaluable addition to Hulu as we enter the next chapter of our business.

In March of this year, Hulu began the search for a new head of marketing, as its then current SVP of Marketing, Jenny Wall, announced her departure. Wall had effectively functioned as CMO, but the title was different. With Campbells hire, the position is now officially that ofCMO.

Campbell is joining after a lengthy career at Google, where she has worked since 2005. Most recently, she was tasked with creating awareness and driving adoption of Google Cloud products, including the Google Cloud platform and G Suite. While at Google, she grew G Suite to 3 million paying customers, and was responsible for the re-branding of G Suite globally. (Before, it was known as Google Apps for Work.)

Prior to serving as managing director of Global Growth Marketing for Google Cloud, Campbell had also held several other marketing roles at Google, including having led Global G Suite Marketing, Small Business and Education Marketing and the North America Ads Marketing team. Before that, she led the Dedicated Client Services team for North America, and spent a year in Tokyo where she built out Googles Online Sales and Operations team.

Before Google, Campbell worked in investment banking for JPMorgan Chase and FleetBoston Financial Corporation. She also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor of science from Vanderbilt University.

Wall had stayed on with Hulu through the end of May in order to oversee the launch of Hulus anticipated series The Handmaids Tale, which has now received 13 Emmy nominations or the majority of Hulus total of 18, and effectively put Hulu on the map as being serious about investments in quality original content.

Though the streaming service had received nominations before, none had yet been in one of the top categories for example, it got nods for variety (Triumphs Election Special 2016), visual effects (11/22/63) and sports series (Behind the Mask) in years past.

Campbell is also joining at a time when Hulu is facing a number of challengers in its newer business, its Live TV streaming service, which allows subscribers to watch and record live TV programming from broadcast networks and cable TV channels, in addition to watching on-demand shows, movies and Hulu originals.

In this business, Hulu has several competitors all vying to be top internet TV providers, including Dishs Sling TV, Sonys PlayStation Vue, AT&Ts DirecTV Now and Googles YouTube TV.

Part of Campbells work will be to make consumers aware of what Hulus brand and content offers, including its original programming and its live TV service (and how it compares with others), while also developing Hulus strategic vision and voice behind its consumer marketing campaigns.

One initiative that could be set on her plate more immediately is handling some consumer backlash over the Hulu redesign. With the launch of Live TV in May, Hulu also began the rollout of a new look for its service, which some complain makes it harder to navigate and use. In fact, the most upvoted item on Hulus user feedback forums is a thread with complaints about the new experience.

Campbell isnt Hulus only recent exec hire. The company also in May announced AMC and Sundance TV president of original programming,Joel Stillerman, as its chief content officer. Stillerman helped develop a number of top programs for the network, including The Walking Dead spin-off Fear the Walking Dead and Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul, among others.

Content marketing company ScribbleLive announced today that it has acquired Linkdex.

In a blog post, ScribbleLives Geoffrey Gualano said the deal will combine his companys content marketing platform with Linkdexs capabilities in search engine optimization:

This acquisition streamlines content marketing and SEO software to empower an all-in-one marketing platform. Marketers can now operationalize their strategies, create beautiful content, target the right audiences, and measure the organic impact of their efforts.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company say Linkdex CEO Mark Smith will continue leading his 40-person team as a division within ScribbleLive.

According to CrunchBase, Linkdex has raised more than $9 million in funding from investors including Amadeus Capital Partners.

Why 'weaponised' social media isn't Brexit's smoking gunThe GuardianWhat the commissioner may not have appreciated when she embarked upon her inquiry, though, is that transparency is about as popular with these companies â not to mention the political actors who exploit their automated systems â as garlic is with Count …

2016 was not the year for faint-hearted marketers as they pushed to measure and prove the ROI of their content marketing efforts in order to fight for larger budgets. Google and Facebook continued to dominate, while the rest of the industry may have shrunk. Concerns around ad blocking, viewability, and measurement accuracy continued to dominate conversations about social platforms.

2017 will be the year of a little less conversation and a little more action. Marketers will demand visibility, whether results are coming from publishers, agencies, technology providers, etc., and if they dont get it, theyll move on. Marketers themselves are under more scrutiny from CEOs and CFOs than ever before.

Publishers are in trouble, while Google and Facebook continue to pull away. Heres a list of all the things we should all be prepared for in 2017:

1. Facebook and Google will continue to dominate. The rest of the industry will shrink

According to the IAB, the digital advertising industry continues to grow nicely. But if you peel back the onion, you’ll see that its actually Facebook and Google that is commanding the lion’s share of the growth. In fact, outside of those two platforms, the rest of the industry isshrinking in Q2. This duopoly is scary, and potentially unhealthy. But I think it will continue next year and don’t see how or when this trend will change.

2. Brands will buy all their own media. Agencies will have to reinvent themselves

Marketers are starting to realize that the media landscape is not that complicated. The trend of taking media buying in-house will continue, and most of the focus will be on Google and Facebook (see above). Agencies will no longer be able to build a business by taking a cut of media spend. The smart ones will reinvent themselves (see below), but the rest will slowly disappear.

3. Marketers will no longer blindly trust third-party data

With demands to prove ROI at an all time high, marketers require insight into the performance of their strategies in order to improve campaigns based on real insights. But with many companies being commercially incentivized to provide bloated data, marketers in 2017 will look outside of those providers for truth. No longer will they blindly accept data from publishers or social networks; theyll demand direct access to the results through independent data providers on everything from branded content to social campaigns. Great news for companies like Moat.

4. Personalization will mean more than just using my first name

Consumers are smart and they expect their world to be personalized. Netflix and Amazon set the bar high, and consumers expect that from brands and publishers. Yet, almost every marketer’s website is generic and one-size-fits-all. Brands will seek out the tools to build custom experiences for individuals that are truly personalized, and this year they will deliver on that promise to consumers. Personalization will move from a buzzword to a fundamental part of the marketers toolkit, across web, social email and every other channel in the customer experience.

5. The death of personas will bring journey mapping to life

Creating personas assumes every individual fits in a given bucket.

Creating personas assumes every individual fits in a given bucket. Recognizing this is an old school method thats no longer acceptable, brands will take a step back and focus on truly understanding the customer journey content consumption, social sharing, purchase behavior, etc. and then determine what those patterns look like to suggest the next best step for each unique consumer.

Closely tied to personalization, journey mapping will become the basis for most modern marketing engines. Companies like Salesforce and Adobe are already investing heavily in this area.

6. Brands will call it quits on the native advertising game

The hype surrounding native advertising will subside, and potentially even die off completely. Content certainly engages audiences better than banners. But brands will realize that there is minimum value on publishing content in full on third party websites owned by publishers. Instead, marketers will run the content on their own properties, allowing them to own their audience and the data. They’ll use Facebook or Google to drive traffic and buy the same (or similar) audience they would reach on the publishers’ sites. This means trouble for publishers, who saw native as the next big hope for digital revenues.

Gen Z learned from its millennial predecessors that oversharing on social has risks, causing them to gravitate towards ephemeral social platforms like Snap. This will pose new challenges for marketers who have been spoiled with vast amounts of insights from earlier generations who didnt necessarily realize the repercussions of the volume of information they shared online.

8. Marketers will no longer be duped by multi-device consumers, single customer profiles will rise

No matter where they are, what theyre doing, consumers are interacting with brands on mobile, tablets, TV screens, desktops – you name it, theyre on it. In 2017, cross-device targeting will take off, forcing brands to create a consistent user experience for each person so that no matter what device theyre engaging on, its as if they picked up exactly where they left off.

9. Live data will breathe life into the marketing mix

Gone are the days of exporting marketing-related performance data; the moment you push that export button the data dies. Instead, marketers will covet data they can access in real-time that provides live insights, making it possible to change course with speed – the speed of consumer preferences and behaviors today.

10. Agencies will have to adapt to survive

With technology making it simpler for brands to easily create beautiful and unique content that engages consumers, agencies will rely on their creative juices to reinvent their business. Theyll team up with technology providers to lead the charge and will hire talent outside of traditional agency roles, to provide fresh new ideas. And for those that dont adapt, brands will be reading and willing to snatch up fresh agency blood as they bring branded content efforts in-house.

Shafqat Islam is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of NewsCred, the worlds leading content marketing platform. As CEO, Shafqat manages the strategic growth of the company, pioneering a new content ecosystem fo…More

Are you addicted to social media? Here's how to checkThe NationalFor some people, social media use can have a negative impact on workplace productivity too. A Pew Research Center survey in Washington, DC in 2014 found 77 per cent of employees reported using social networking platforms at work, while 56 per cent …

Diego Gomes is the publisher of SaaSholic, a blog about the growing SaaS market in Brazil and the software sectors founders. He is the co-founder and CMO of Rock Content, the largest content marketing company in Brazil, and former editor of the ReadWriteWeb blog in Brazil.

The SaaS market in Brazil is booming. It mirrors the rapid adoption of SaaS as the dominant cloud computing type in a global public cloud services market thats forecast to reach more than $122 billion in 2017, per research firm IDC. Earlier this year, we embarked on an inaugural survey of more than 400 executives of Brazil-based SaaS companies, the largest research project of its kind in the region.

Here is just one founding story of a Brazilian SaaS startup called RD Station thats indicative of the growth and fast-changing landscape of the SaaS market in Latin Americas largest country as new VC and corporate venture investment in Brazil continues to rise:

Eric Santos launched his first SaaS startup in 2011 alongside co-founders Andr Siqueira, Bruno Ghisi, Pedro Bachiega and Guilherme Lopes. They set up a small office in Florianpolis, the capital of southern Brazils Santa Catarina state. The team entered a crowded space of marketing automation with a nimble, but strikingly simple SaaS platform. It featured a landing-page creator, a metrics dashboard and an email marketing platform. But they understood the challenges of the Brazilian marketer and gained initial traction through a blog and community meetups.

Business growth was slow in the beginning, but steady. It took the small team about two and a half years to reach the R$1 million (about US$300,000) in annual recurring revenues (ARR). To help accelerate its growth, the early-stage startup raised a Series A round in 2013.

Fast-forward to 2017: RD Station has expanded exponentially. It now offers a full-featured marketing automation platform. Its annual conference attracts 10,000 marketers to Florianpolis. Today, theyve grown from a small, bootstrapped startup with just five founders to 450 employees and more than 9,000 customers in just six years. With this kind of growth, it attracted local investors such as DGF, Astella and Redpoint eventures. More recently, international VCs TPG Growth and Endeavor Catalyst have invested. The companys total funding today is north of US$30 million and RD Station is growing more than 150 percent year-over-year, an impressive number as only one-third of Brazilian SaaS startups achieve this kind of growth at this stage, per our research study.

A familiar tale for SaaS founders in Brazil

Many Brazilian SaaS entrepreneurs share a similar story. The local market is growing at an accelerated pace. Every other week, were seeing new local and foreign VCs investing. Brazil is the fifth-largest internet and mobile economy in the world, and one of the primary international markets for juggernauts such as Google and Facebook. Like the evolution of the internet in the U.S., businesses in Brazil are increasingly online and seeking SaaS solutions.

Brazil is the fifth-largest internet and mobile economy in the world.

According to Manoel Lemos, a managing director of VC firm Redpoint eventures, SaaS is now a sizable opportunity for Brazilian startups. Lemos is seeing a trend of more experienced, high-quality entrepreneurs, leaving companies such as Salesforce and LinkedIn in Brazil to start their first businesses. While Brazil is still only scratching the surface to breed global SaaS players of the likes of Salesforce or Zendesk, companies like RD Station are scaling quickly across Brazil and starting to set their sights on global markets.

Enter Brazils first robust SaaS market landscape

In May 2017, with support from Signal Hill and Redpoint eventures, we surveyed 597 Brazil-based SaaS founders (49 percent CEOs) to launch the inaugural version of our survey, called The Brazil SaaS Landscape 2017. It is important to note that the Brazil SaaS market is relatively new. Out of the companies polled in the survey, 71 percent were founded after 2010. In this research, we analyzed data about funding, employee strength, revenues, retention rates and growth rates of SaaS startups in Brazil. Here are some of the most interesting things we learned.

So Paulo is the SaaS capital of Brazil, followed by Santa Catarina and Minas Gerais

Almost 50 percent of SaaS startups are based in So Paulo, and 41 percent of total startups that surpassed R$1 million in ARR are based there. Santa Catarina takes second place for fast-paced growth. According to Diego Wagner, founder of Meetime, an inside-sales platform, Santa Catarinas SaaS community is growing fast thanks to startup founders and employees giving back to the community with workshops, angel investments and mentoring.

Minas Gerais, a large inland state in southeastern Brazil, clocked in at third-fastest for SaaS company growth. According to Drew Beaurline, founder of Construct, an issue-tracking and communications app for construction companies, the local SaaS community there is fueled by government-funded programs such as the SEED startup accelerator.

As a budding entrepreneur with zero capital, I was amazed I could contract a senior developer for a fraction of the cost it would take in San Francisco, says Beaurline. Plus, there were many more equity-free accelerator programs funded by the government. Drew, who moved from California to Belo Horizonte, noted that Googles first acquisition outside of the U.S. was in Akwan, a company based in Belo Horizonte.

We were surprised to find that more than 71 percent of Brazilian SaaS businesses of those surveyed are self-funded with no outside investors. Take Superlgica as an example: The company provides recurring billing software and the founders bootstrapped it, growing it to 5,000 customers and more than 130 employees. Superlgica grew more than 100 percent in 2016, and plans triple its revenue with the launch of its own payment service, according to its chief growth officer, Carlos Moura.

Of those who raised capital, only 10 percent of SaaS founders raised more than R$10 million (about US$3 million). Most investment in SaaS has come from VC firms based in Brazil. Funds such as Ebricks (Contabilizei, ERPFlex), Monashees+ (Conta Azul, RunRun.it) and Redpoint eventures (Gympass, Olist,Pismo), are making investment bets in the SaaS space. Regarding valuations, the median multiple for SaaS rounds to date is roughly six times ARR.

Brazilian SaaS startups funding

Brazilian SaaS startups are incredibly capital-efficient

If you look at public, mature SaaS businesses in the U.S., many of them take more than 12 months to recover customer-acquisition costs. In Brazil, this is not true. Taking a deep look into the survey data, we can see that Brazilian startups are more like mountain goats (or cockroaches) than unicorns: they are not magical, but they are reliable and resilient. More than 60 percent of startups surveyed recover their customer-acquisition costs (CAC) in less than six months. They have healthy unit economics: 67 percent of them have a LTV/CAC ratio superior to three, a feat that would make David Skok proud.

This enables them to survive and thrive in case of even tighter funding markets. We wonder if a change in the funding market, making more capital available to those companies, wouldnt transform our goats into magical beings.

Time to recover CAC for Brazilian SaaS companies

The SaaS-enabled marketplace is happening in Brazil, too

More than a quarter (26 percent) of the companies surveyed have a marketplace component baked into their offerings. Companies like Gympass have attached marketplace components to SaaS products and seem to be succeeding. According to Manoel Lemos, having a marketplace component helps companies create barriers to entry from foreign competition and produces a network advantage.

On the other hand, in our extensive research, we did not find any correlation with a marketplace component driving growth rates or business success across the 597 startups surveyed.

Brazilian SaaS-enabled marketplaces

Big Brazil SaaS market with its own distinctive twist

With a population of more than 211 million people, there are many potential customers to sell to, and SaaS startups are highly focused on Brazil first. SaaS products from Brazil are not clones of ones from the U.S. They mostly adapt to the local tastes and address the many government bureaucracies. Contabilizei, for example, focuses on helping small businesses manage accounting. Because all Brazilian companies are obliged by law to have an accountant, Contabilizei replaces the external accountant. When SaaS companies do expand outside Brazil, they tend to focus on other regions in Latin America first, due to proximity and lower competition.

Inspiring a new wave of SaaS entrepreneurs

One of our key learnings is that hiring the right people is the most important thing to succeed as a SaaS company, says Guilherme Lopes, one RD Stations co-founders. We were lucky to assemble such a talented and committed team thats willing to learn the best practices and overcome the challenges that a SaaS startup faces in an emerging market like Brazil. When we started, there werent a lot of local benchmarks or data about the Brazilian market. We were always crazy about metrics and quite meticulous about digging into U.S.-based data and research to help guide us. But, we never knew how we compared to peers. I guess we did fine without it, but Im glad about having in-depth data on other Brazilian SaaS companies to better understand our market dynamics.

If you want to learn more about other founders stories like these and how the Brazilian SaaS landscape is evolving, check out the full research report here.

The Hottest Content Marketing Trends 2018Bluffton TodayThe age-old paradigm â 'Content Is King'â holds true to this day. Marketing is a dynamic activity where the goal is to create a need for a company's products and services with the end user. Driving customers through the sales funnel is paramount …

(CNN)There can’t be many full-time bloggers in the world who employ wealth managers.

Johnny Ward, a 32-year-old Irishman intent on “living life with passion,” is one.

He’s one of a handful of travel bloggers in the world earning six-figure incomes each year through their blogging.

In a few weeks he’ll complete a decade-old quest to visit every country in the world, a mission he’s documenting on his onestep4ward blog.

An impressive achievement on its own. That he’s been able to earn more than $1 million over the last three years through blogging puts him firmly in the “whaaaaa?” category of inspirational own-your-own-life stories.

And he seems astonished that so few others are doing the same.

It’s hard to tell whether he thinks us office drones are dumb or he has sympathy for our plight. But he speaks with the zeal of an evangelist who’s seen the light and can’t believe no one else is even looking.

“If I can do this, anyone can do it,” he says via Skype from a stylish two-bed apartment in Bangkok that he bought outright with his earnings. “It just takes a bit of belief.”

Money matters

“I’ve been extolling the virtues of chasing your dreams and living the free life that you want to live and not signing up to the nine to five slog for years, you know. So it’s a bit disappointing that only when I mention the money does it go viral.

“I understand it — money is important and I’m grateful for all the attention. But it’s a little sad too.”

He’s referring to last summer, when Business Insider, HuffPo, Forbes and others picked up his $1-million-in-three-years story.

But what comes easy to Ward doesn’t come easy to everyone.

His tale starts in 2006, when he left university in the UK and headed straight to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to teach English.

He earned peanuts.

After a year he moved to Sydney as a sales rep, cold-calling customers, and earned $20,000 commission in one month.

Ward quickly points out that was a one-off — but here we get our first clue to Ward’s success — he’s a born salesman.

“I have no problem asking for the world. If you don’t ask you don’t get,” he concedes.

Having saved some money, and growing bored of the cubicle life, Ward quit to travel. But forced to see out his notice period, he started a blog.

While traveling through Ethiopia he won his first ad.

“A great day. I started posting more regularly, and by Christmas I was making about $500 a month.

“Around this time too all the stuff about SEO and link-building was starting to take off. By 2011 I was hitting $1,000-2,000 a month and I was starting to realize that this was legit, that I could actually earn a living doing this.”

He launched and bought more websites.

“Eventually I was making upwards of five figures a month, with the best month being $60,000. That was amazing. And so I worked out that averaging about $30,000 a month, over three years I made about $1 million. It’s all totally accurate and real.”

‘I just want to be free’

From his single blog his stable has grown to around 250 websites and Ward also now runs an online media company.

In a move “The 4-Hour Work Week” author Tim Ferriss would be proud of, he outsources a lot of the hard graft so he can work just a few hours each week.

He says: “I just want to be free, you know. I want to be financially strong enough to be able to do what I want. If I want to go to Brazil tomorrow, I want to be able to go. That’s it.

2009: Started a travel blog, posting once or twice a week

2010: Got a request for a single $85 ad

2010: Posted more frequently, saw more ads come in

2011: Generated revenue of up to $2,000 per month

2013: Started to ramp up with more sites and more content marketing

2013: Hit a high of $60,000 in a single month

2015: Passed 250 websites under management and $1 million in earnings

“At least I feel that I’m not wasting my life. I hear people counting down, ‘Only 45 days till I go to Bermuda for a week!’ and I think, what are you doing?

“When I say I’m maximizing my life, I’m not drinking Long Island iced teas in the Maldives, you know. I’m maximizing my experiences, and I go to bed thinking well that was a cool week, and next week’s going to be cool too. That’s what I mean.”

Ward is full of anecdotes, any one of which could be a scene from a Stallone/Van Damme/Schwarzenegger blockbuster.

Scattered among them are throwaway comments along the lines of “and so I talked my way out of that.” More clues to how he got to where he is.

There’s his trip to Angola, a tricky travel prospect at the best of times, which began badly as he sat in gridlocked traffic shortly after landing.

“Suddenly two dudes rock up to the car next to me, rip open the door, shoot the guy and grab something out of the car.

“This gunman was scared now, you know, obviously the adrenaline was rushing, and for a moment he stared into my car, right into my eyes, and I find myself staring right back at him.

“My driver then hits the gas and we move away, but the crazy thing was I was freaking out and my driver’s just calmly laughing at me, because it turned out he killed 40 people in the civil war there years before! It’s a crazy country.”

Unreal stories

Or there’s the time he tried to smuggle himself across the border from Ivory Coast to Sierra Leone, twice, got caught, twice, and during the armed escort to the airport witnessed a bus crash with “dead bodies everywhere.”

Or the time he was in Kabul when a suicide bomber struck. Or the time he was in Tibet when an earthquake hit Nepal.

“Now when I tell these stories, it almost feels like I’m making it up, he says. “I’ve got photos of it all but it becomes part of your history. They don’t feel real anymore, it’s weird.”

Hotels now pay him to write about them. “Once you get 100,000 social followers you never need to pay for a hotel again.”

And despite being hit by a Google algorithm change that halved his revenue in 2014/2015, “it’s never dipped below five figures in a month.”

Ward, to his credit, seems to have remained grounded, and even a little vulnerable.

The urge to settle

This list is incidentally another clue to his success — every item considered, committed to paper (or a webpage) and gratifyingly crossed out once achieved.

“I’m a super-goal-oriented person. These missions give me a sense of completion.”

Next up is a similarly goal-oriented plan to travel the world Jules Verne-style, in 80 days. But he readily admits that a life of constant movement can be tiring.

“I want a base, where I have friends and can party and the people in the shops know your face. There’s no way I want to bounce around indefinitely.”

With two, possibly three properties (pending a new purchase) in Bangkok and London, and thousands in the bank (he’s not quite a millionaire yet, he doesn’t think, but he’s getting close), that should be one of his easier challenges yet.